What Rand Paul really believes

It's worth stepping back and considering the larger story here. It took a raging national media controversy to persuade the GOP Senate candidate in Kentucky to state unequivocally that the Federal government should have the power to tell restaurants they are not allowed to decline African Americans service based on their skin color.

After all, it's clear that Rand Paul been unwilling to embrace this idea -- for many years. Here's some proof: Dave Weigel has unearthed a 2002 writing by Paul in which he attacked a local paper, the Bowling Green Daily News, for endorsing the Fair Housing Act.

The key is that Paul hinged his entire argument on the distinction between outlawing discrimination by public and private entities. He wrote that "a free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin."

And he added that discrimination should only be prohibited in the case of public institutions:

Should it be prohibited for public, taxpayer-financed institutions such as schools to reject someone based on an individual's beliefs or attributes? Most certainly. Should it be prohibited for private entities such as a church, bed and breakfast or retirement neighborhood that doesn't want noisy children? Absolutely not.

That's key to understanding today's dispute. Paul is no racist -- he repeatedly decried racism and discrimination. But by all indications he fundamentally doesn't believe that the government should have the power to prohibit private institutions from discriminating against people not just on the basis of race, but also religion, gender and national origin, which the Civil Rights Act also outlawed.

Yes, Paul did release a statement today clarifying that he fully supports the Civil Rights Act and doesn't believe it should be repealed. But that first statement only went as far as endorsing its prohibition of discrimination in the public sphere.

Only after his campaign was pressed for clarification was he willing to allow that the government should, in fact, have the power to bar discrimination by private institutions.

That, combined with his previous writings and statements, shows pretty clearly what his true beliefs are. Or, at least, what they were until today, when a raging national controversy forced him to revise them.

I'm confused. The following from your article seem to be mutually exclusive points of view: "Paul is no racist -- he repeatedly decried racism and discrimination. But by all indications he fundamentally doesn't believe that the government should have the power to prohibit private institutions from discriminating against people not just on the basis of race, but also religion, gender and national origin, which the Civil Rights Act also outlawed."

Paul NOT BELIEVING that the Government has the power to prohibit private institutions from discriminating against anyone makes him a RACIST! You can't have it both ways... Either you abdicate or you don't! Either you're pregnant or you're not. NOT BOTH!

Since Rand Paul did not come out, in public, personally and articulate that he believes ALL FORMS OF DISCRIMINATION are wrong, regardless of the forum or venue, then he's a RACIST! PERIOD...

rbaldwin,I dont think I worded it clearly enough. I meant he may personally not be racist or believe in discrimination, but simultaneously doesn't believe the government should have hte power to outlaw it in the case of private institutions

Pretty sad if *that* is his undoing. I am a progressive liberal but I believe to use a simple gotcha to nail the man is political trickery. Have a fair debate with him, determine where the disagreements are and then make a decision whether you support his positions. I certainly don't but not because someone tried to corner him on a single phrase.

And why is one STRAIGHT WHITE MALE after another, including Sargent and Weigel, lecturing the rest of us about how private-sector discrimination is no big problem? I'm sure it isn't, not to these straight white males who are wallowing in their own privilege.

There is a distinction here. Paul may well judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, but his beliefs condone institutional, systemic racism. And he knows that. He believes the government has no role in enforcing racial equality (or equal access by people with disabilities) in any private place.

For Paul, the "free market" will take care of this ("it's a bad business decision to discriminate," he said).

Do I need to give you details of what's wrong with this? If so, then I don't think you know what you're talking about.

@ rernst :I am a progressive liberal but I believe to use a simple gotcha to nail the man is political trickery.

This is not a gotcha question. It is a fundamental belief.

Rand Paul has stated on several occasions that people's property rights in the constitution outweigh the rights of individuals seeking public accommodations regardless of race, gender, etc. Its a very basic part of our legal structure. It is important to make sure that his position is clear. Where is the gotcha in that?

Slave Sargent:
"Only after his campaign was pressed for clarification was he willing to allow that the government should, in fact, have the power to bar discrimination by private institutions.

That, combined with his previous writings and statements, shows pretty clearly what his true beliefs are. Or, at least, what they were until today, when a raging national controversy forced him to revise them."

That's gonna cut too close to home for all too many of your moonbat livestock, Meme-master....Mayonnaise mike from White Separatist Aryanton, VA comes to mind.

The fact of the matter is that private property is just that...private.

Once the government, for any reason, begins dictating what the owner can and cannot do with that property, it ceases to become private.

And while this may be perceived by the feeble-minded as just hunky-dory today, do try to remember that what comes around goes around, and YOUR ox will be the one getting gored tomorrow.

Let's just remind everyone how great the intentions of private industry are to the people of the world. See that number, there's a live feed up at Bill Nelsons website, the "straw" is capturing 210,000 gallons per day, check out how much it's not capturing and then try to figure out how much went into the water before they were able to capture that much oil.

Update: the live feed had so many hits it crashed, so check back later, the link is below.

"BP says a mile-long tube is capturing 210,000 gallons of oil a day, but some is still escaping. The company initially estimated 210,000 gallons was the total amount of the spill."

Slave uh-huhhhh:
"And why is one STRAIGHT WHITE MALE after another, including Sargent and Weigel, lecturing the rest of us about how private-sector discrimination is no big problem? I'm sure it isn't, not to these straight white males who are wallowing in their own privilege."

That's actually a verty germane observation.

One could also inquire why it is that moonbat honkies who don't live in anything like proportionately integrated areas, are usually the first and the loudest to holler "RACISM".

It's because it's all a smokescreen to hide their own feelings on the matter and deflect attention away from themselves.

It also has the effect of reducing the charge of "RACISM" to a threadbare and sick joke.

No one who matters really GAS anymore about who gets accused of racism.

The jukebox has broken, and that particular record just doesn't play anymore.

Try it in person with people you know. Accuse some political figure of "RACISM!" and watch peoples' faces tighten in disgust...at you.

@bm:Once the government, for any reason, begins dictating what the owner can and cannot do with that property, it ceases to become private.

So food safety laws, worker safety laws, child labor laws, the FDA, USDA, etc. are all unconstitutional in your view because these laws and the agencies that enforce them infringe on what a private property owner can do with his/her property? A person is free to mislabel drugs and sell them to unsuspecting customers in your view. You advocate going back to the days of "patent medicine"? Selling tainted meat is OK by you. Back to the meat packing houses of the 1900's?

Why don't you go to Somalia and start a business there where there are no truth in advertising or food safety laws if you think its such a great idea to have no regulation?

I'm very pleased this matter has come up and gained the media attention we see (thank you Rachel). There are enormous policy implications here for how we organize ourselves as a community and nation. And I think the chances of more than a sliver of the population approving of those consequences is zero.

But the more important aspect here, it seems to me, is that Republicans/conservatives are hoping to 1) swing Paulians over to them in November (to gain the advantage of their activism and to reduce chances of a third party split) and 2) try to re-cast Republicanism as libertarianism to hopefully cast off the stench of their rotted brand.

Thus demonstrating to citizens that this "new" incarnation is in its own way batpoop nuts and hugely cruel in consequence is a very good thing indeed.

"I watched the videos of Paul yesterday, and as DougJ noted, there is a full-on village freak-out going on. But I think it is unfair to tar Paul as racist, because I don’t think anything in those videos gives me any ideas into his personal opinion about people of color. If anything, in that regard, they would seem to me to be exculpatory as regards to any charge of racism.

What Paul has nicely done is illustrate that libertarianism, taken to its complete extreme, is a ridiculous and useless ideology. Paul’s argument is, essentially, that in a free society you have to tolerate some a**holes, and that some of them will be racist. I don’t think that makes Paul a racist, but I do think it kind of makes him an idiot.

I like freedom as much as the next person and want as little government intervention into every aspect of life as possible, but if I have to make a judgment call, I place the right of people to be free to be racist below the right of minorities to be freed from racism. Call me crazy. We’ve also decided as a society that we draw the line at allowing people the freedom to rape their kids, to murder each other, and all sort of other stuff. This is not a revolutionary concept, and we tolerate that government “interference” quite capably.

Politically, this is evidence of even more of the GOP minority outreach. I’d like to hear Rand Paul ask Michael Steele how long he would have been willing to wait for local officials to decide whether or not Jim Crow or separate water fountains is unacceptable."

Sullivan (?) at The Daily Dish points out that Paul's problem is that he makes this an abstract, intellectual argument. As Cole says, Paul takes libertarianism to its extreme. I think there may be more than a few folks out there who long for a sort of "pragmatic" libertarianism that Paul does not here enunciate.

There is a valid intellectual argument, and then there is reality.

"To bar private business owners from discriminating in employment would have been an unthinkable power for the federal government for much of American history...[but] this is settled law [now] and should remain that way...it is not without cost to liberty...And a real libertarian will feel some qualms about it. Not because they are racists or homophobes (although some may be). But because a truly principled defense of individual freedom will inevitably confront the huge role government now plays in policing fairness in what were once entirely unfair private transactions....

"Paul's entirely abstract intellectual argument wrests pure principles out of an actual society, with actual historical atrocities, violence, oppression and contempt. That's why I cannot be a libertarian the way some others like Paul are. I do not believe you can reify an abstraction like liberty and separate it from the context - historical, cultural, moral - in which it lives and breathes and from which it emerged. I can believe in freedom and believe in equality of opportunity but I should be mature enough to see when there has to be a compromise between the two - and decide. On the issue of race in America, the libertarian right was proven wrong - morally, empirically wrong."

"Bruce Bartlett writes, "as we know from history, the free market did not lead to a breakdown of segregation. ... Thus we have a perfect test of the libertarian philosophy and an indisputable conclusion: it didn't work. Freedom did not lead to a decline in racism; it only got worse."

"inevitably confront the huge role government now plays in policing fairness in what were once entirely unfair private transactions..."

The key words here are "what were once".

That something once was the case gives us little compelling reason to believe that it is necessarily a good at all. It just was the way things once were.

It was also once the case that women could not vote. It was once the case that no one had any "right" to representation in a court of law or to be heard by a jury of peers. It was once the case that your daughter could be raped by the landowner or anyone of a higher social class and there was naught you could do about it (quite recently, if you were black). It was once the case that factory owners could lock the doors from outside to prevent workers from going to the bathroom (or escaping flames, as in the Triangle Shirtwaist Building Fire in NYC).

This is about what type of laws we are and are not going to have. Period.

The best way to handle conservatives and especially Tea Party conservatives - and especially those running for the job of making and repealing laws - is to focus like a laser beam not on some question of whether they are personally racists but instead on comparing and contrasting the set of laws they want to exist and not exist to that set of laws that the rest of us would like to see exist and not exist.

The goal should be to fully educate every last member of the public as to what the results are of this comparing and contrasting, meaning educating the public fully on the complete consequences in detail of what one set would be vs. what the other set would be.

That's right - do not assume that the public already knows these results and complete consequences in detail. Assume instead that the reason conservatives and especially Tea Party conservatives have whatever political power they do is because they capitalize on the ignorance of so much of the general public as to what set of laws they want to exist and not exist. Evidence: So many did not know that Paul wants discrimination by private entities like businesses to be legal.

Take away this ignorance in all these people, and you take away a lot of this political power. The problem is one of truly and fully educating a public many of whom are anything but.

Ron Paul is a longterm segregationist who has attended racist events and hobnobbed with the neo-Confederate movement's leaders. He has a long hstory of making bigoted claims and opposing civil rights legislation, even opposing the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, and joining Jared Taylor in insulting Rosa Parks The rotten apple, Rand, did not fall far from the tree.

You are naive to buy into the pretext that support for segregation is about something other than racism.

@Bernie: "That something once was the case gives us little compelling reason to believe that it is necessarily a good at all. It just was the way things once were."

I do not believe that Andrew argues to the contrary?

You seem to be arguing that since the libertarian philosophy did not lead to a decline in racism that it therefore is not valid in ANY regard. I argue for a pragmatic libertarian approach to a variety of issues. Regarding the race issue - the libertarian approach was wrong.

Huh??? Either Paul believes that the government has the power under the constitution to regulate some aspects of private property rights (like not allowing businesses to pick and choose who they will serve in a restaurant based on race or gender) or he doesn't. The SCOTUS says yes it does. Does Paul agree with that conclusion or does he think its wrong? If it the civil rights laws are wrong, isn't it his constitutional duty to try to write legislation that would repeal the offending parts?
Its a very straightforward question.

I am on my iPad and running around the Web to get citations is not ideal. However, people who want to read Ron Paul's very own statements about civil rights can Google them. Search with "civil rights" as a key phrase. You can also search his cache at lewrockwell.com, a neo-Confederate haven. There was plenty of coverage of overtly racist newsletters Ron Paul tried to disown during 2007-8, including denunciations by some conservatives. Among other bon mots, Paul says only about five percent of black people are intelligent enough to vote.

Yes, I know Rand Paul is a different person. But, basically, he is picking up the cudgel for his not long for this world father. If elected, he will be ineffective, but folks should know people with 1950s views are running in 2010.

I wouldn't call Ron Paul an "angry white man." He is a very sneaky, egotistic fellow enjoying some of the success that evaded him in His likely last decade. Paul has mastered double-talk better than any politician I can think of. For example, he delivers big on earmarks while simultaneously assailing them. Maybe Sarah Palin learned from him.

As an American w/ a disability (due to a spinal cord injury), Paul represents the type of Republican who would take our country back...way back, to the year 1910 say.

Rand Paul has some interesting beliefs but his form of libertarianism would result in a much more limited (weak) Constitution than what we're used to and gives cover to conservative racists and Neo-Confederacy types. Is this the purpose for Paul's ideology??

He stated the Civil Rights Act and Americans' With Disability Act need to be neutered b/c they supposedly interfere w/ business owners private property rights (and the right of racists and bigots to be racists and bigots, which Paul must think is a valued part of white Southern culture). Of course he didn't mention that black and disabled Americans may just want Congress to uphold their equal Constitutional rights to not be treated as 2nd class, inferior citizens.

Paul has stated the usual red hearing that the market will address this issue (don't worry bout your Constitutional rights suckas!)...b/c somehow a scenario will develop where business A, owned by a racist and anti-disability bigot who wants to exclude blacks and the disabled, will compete for customers w/ business B, owned by the non-racist and non-bigot...or maybe disabled Americans should pay a usage fee of say $50 to $500 when they access a businesses' expensive ramp.

Maybe a restaurant chain owned by a religious nut would decide on a whim to ban all disabled people...b/c he believes disability is Gaaaawwwwd's punishment.

A high level of discrimination, legally protected segregation, and very little access to public life for disabled Americans...as well as a neutered Constitution would be the result of Paul's dream for us all.

Rand Paul was absolutely right with this initial comment for two reasons:

1. The federal government simply has no power granted to it by the people to regulate private business not engaged in interstate commerce: Check out our Bill of Rights.
2. If you concede that private ownership does not protect you from federal government intrusion or regulation, then what possible argument could you raise against the inescapable conclusion that the government may dictate who you allow into your house, considering that many business are run from owners' private homes?

The reason government strives to make everyone dependent on government privileges of one sort or another is precisely for coertion, such as for example, onerous conditions to the States in order to receive monies (which come from the States in the first place) for projects or programs. Once a benefit is accepted, government can regulate!

Sadly, the intellectual weaklings and overt statists will use any trick to defeat a constitutionalist who will vote against illegal and wasteful government growth.

People of any persuasion who love freedom more than comfort should have no problem supporting the notion that government is like a cancer that is killing this once-great Nation! The Dr. is in!

srw3 asks: "So food safety laws, worker safety laws, child labor laws, the FDA, USDA, etc. are all unconstitutional in your view because these laws and the agencies that enforce them infringe on what a private property owner can do with his/her property?"

By strict libertarian principles, yes, and it's relatively easy to find actual libertarians arguing exactly that. In most cases they invoke the market as the force that will correct the situation. If a company poisons enough people with its product, customers will go elsewhere and/or sue the company, and it will go out of business. Thus we eventually reach the desired end-state, where no companies are selling poison as medicine.

The odd thing is that those making this argument recognize that the end-state is preferable, but they still insist that it's better to rely on the markets and courts to reach that state, rather than have the FDA check medicines. This is thus a fairly exact parallel with Paul's position (or at least, one of the ones he has passed through during the last forty-eight hours): racism by businesses is terrible, but passing a law against it is worse.

Libertarianism didn't work? Freedom didn't work?
The rights of people to be free from racism is greater than the right of people to be racists?

What planet are you people from?

Libertarianism existed within our government only for about 50 years from the moment of inception before federalism suppressed it. There is no doubt that since 1850-60 and specially after Andrew Jackson's death and the growth of central banking and government schooling we haven't had any vestiges of Libertarianism in our form of government.

If you think a person's right to be a racist should be trumped by other peoples' "rights" to be free from racism, then why not enforce the "right" of the atheist to be free from religion (people should not be allowed to practice their religion, if it offends you!).

Obviusly you don't know the difference between disposition and action. Let me explain it: Government cannot stop you or prohibit from lusting for the opposite (of for some of you, the same) sex, but it can punish your actions. Now, do you understand? You cannot be stopped from thinking like a racist.

Don't you understand individual rights are only constrained by the equal rights of others? Your rights increase when freedom grows, and diminish when government intrudes.

If you look at Libertarianism and conclude that it failed, what successes of the alternative are you comparing it to? Considering that:

1. Almost every single God-given right described in the Bill of Rights and secured by the blood of revolutionary patriots is being eroded by the federal government (See the thorough documentation in James Bovard's "Lost Rights")

2. While you complain that Paul wants to take us to 1910 as if it were a bad thing, if it were to happen, then everyone's wealth would increase 25 fold! (A dollar today is worth only 4 cents)

So yes, freedom is not perfect, and no, it cannot bring a "paradise" (proletarian or otherwise pleasing to everyone), but it hs fared better than any other alternative. All other alternatives simply give the Power to the government. Our country was designed for the government to have Minimal power, and the people to yield little power to the government. Freedom works best when we accept personal responsibility and fails to work when we want someone, anyone else, to be responsible for us.

If the complex systems of self and society were as simple as we wanted them to be, the world would be so much easier to understand and manage. It is one thing to imagine your ideals, but implementation is another thing altogether.
The use of force by an authority attempting to control sociological mechanisms in society will do nothing to correct the actual source of the problem in the individual. Behavior of the citizen or private business holder when acting out irrationally towards his fellow man will not truly change without the spark of reason that acts as guide towards a real understanding. Reprehensible actions such as racial/sexual orientation screening during hiring can sometimes be corrected by social pressures of peers effecting business and reputation, but real change will rarely (if ever) occur under the threat of punishment by an authority. Social changes that occur by threat only occur as a reaction to fear and things like bigotry will quickly return with overcompensation when that threat is removed.
Real social change does not occur under threat - these constraints imply that consequences are all that dictate course the of action - that it is only wrong when one gets caught. We've gone down that road far enough already.

Liberty cannot flourish in a nation that does not allow for the freedom a man requires to think and act for himself. You'd be hard pressed to find a thinker within our nation's tapestry that thinks otherwise.

Think for yourself. Question authority. These are no longer tenants held by left or right. They've been gathered by the feral and disassociated from the wilderness where they were left to die. This new group is hard to put a finger on, but it is beginning to converge. Unfortunately it is diverse in everything but color - I'd like to think this could be attributed to a lack of understanding like that of the author, but I'd perhaps be deluding myself.
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Perhaps the left believes a man must be controlled before he even begins to make the effort required to break free? It would be fantasy for me to imagine they would even have the foresight and mental capacity required to notice the dialectic trailhead on the causeway, tenfold to imagine they'd make the proper entrance.